Corbella: Neil Young chooses his own comfort over his convictions

Several luxury buses used for Neil Young’s Honor the Treaties four-city concert tour were left running outside while the rocker gave a news conference ahead of his concert Sunday night at the Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts.Photo by

While Neil Young spoke to a Calgary news conference at the Jack Singer Concert Hall prior to his Sunday night show, five rock star-style motorhomes were left running outside, spewing fumes into the Calgary air, even though they were mostly unoccupied.

Inside the concert hall, the 68-year-old rock ‘n’ roll legend was talking about the “elephant in the room,” which he later explained was man-made global warming. The only elephant I could see was his enormous carbon footprint and his even bigger hypocrisy between his walk and his talk.

Oh, his talk is righteous, all right. His walk, however, remains an abomination.

Calgary was the last stop on Young’s four-city Honor the Treaties tour, which is designed to raise awareness and money for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, which is suing the federal government and Shell Canada in an effort to stop Shell’s Jackpine Mine expansion proposal in northern Alberta.

The first question Young was asked was, does he ever fly on private jets?

“Yes, I do fly on private jets,” said the 68-year-old rock ‘n’ roll hall of famer. “Sometimes I have to brush shoulders with oil executives,” he said, his face screwing up in distaste. The horror! Poor old Neil. If that’s supposed to absolve him of some of his environmental guilt, he needs to recognize that oil executives don’t tend to lecture others on how to live absolving them of the sin of hypocrisy, at least.

“Sometimes to play my shows I have to use them (private jets) to get from one place to another to do my job and be in good enough shape to do my job when I get there,” explained Young.

So, what’s the main thing wrong with that explanation? If you said Young’s use of the words “I have to,” you’d be right. Neil Young does NOT “have to” fly on a private jet. He chooses to.

In other words, for Neil Young and other hawkers of hypocrisy like him, he chooses his own comfort over his convictions. Actually, scrap that. If he actually truly believed that human created CO2 causes catastrophic global warming, he wouldn’t even so much as look at a private jet let alone climb aboard one.

Flying by private jet is the most carbon intensive way to move humans next to space travel.

According to a 2008 report entitled High Flyers: How Private Jet Travel is Straining the System, Warming the Planet, and Costing You Money,” private jet travel is at least five times more carbon intensive than commercial air travel.

For example, the report states that four passengers flying in a private Cessna Citation X from Los Angeles to New York would each be responsible for more than five times as much CO2 emitted by a commercial air passenger making the same trip.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that the person who chirped up to come to Young’s defence on his high-flying lifestyle was David Suzuki, the CBC television star who is fond of flying hither and yon and is severely over housed — as he owns several large homes and often insists on his own limo when he goes on CBC shoots rather than travel with the rest of the film crew. Two CBC camera men, who have asked to remain anonymous, have told me so.

Outside, Young’s diesel buses spewed away, keeping the interiors toasty warm, with a big-screen television displaying a football game to no one at all.

How do I know that the buses were running while Young was inside the Jack Singer concert hall? Because I spoke to a security guard tasked with keeping fans away from the five buses parked along 9th Avenue across from the Epcor Centre of the Performing Arts and also in the parking lot and in the loading dock.

When asked if the buses had all been kept running for the past hour, he said they had been running for longer than that.

I knocked on the doors of all of the buses, rented or leased from Florida Coach Luxury Design and Leasing, and only one was opened by a young man who introduced himself as a cook. The chef explained that the motorhomes, must be kept running to run the equipment aboard.

“But some of the buses don’t appear to have anyone on board,” I said.

“We just always keep them running whether they’re occupied or not, but we use bio-diesel which is trucked in from the U.S., so it’s OK.”

Get it? A little bio diesel here a little solar power there and the gigantic greenhouse gas footprint of the likes of Neil Young and David Suzuki should be overlooked by us peons who have much smaller carbon footprints.

Never mind that biodiesel is causing great hardship for the world’s poorest citizens since staple food crops like corn are used to power vehicles rather than grow their food, causing their food prices to spike.

There is no doubt that Neil Young is a very talented musician with a heart of gold. Too bad his facts are made of mush and his lifestyle and rock-star livelihood is the very thing that makes Saudi Arabia’s bloody oil gush and pressure for Alberta’s oilsands to continue to grow.

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